


from ashes

by vargs



Category: Shiki (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied One-sided Natsuno/Tohru, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, squint and you'll see - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargs/pseuds/vargs
Summary: He doesn’t remember how he came to be here, but he does remember the distant sound of the villagers, the smell of fire and blood, Ritsu-chan weak and quiet beside him.





	from ashes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CheshireJabberwock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheshireJabberwock/gifts).



When Tohru opens his eyes, it is to complete and utter darkness.

After a moment of confusion, he thinks to himself that this is expected: _I must be dead_. If he’d still had a heart that beat in his chest, it would have stalled on its next thump, for his next thought is: _but I have already died once before and awoken in a nightmare_.

Which begs the question— _so then, what will I be waking up to this time?_

In the next instant, an unintelligible scrape of a cry—like the ones he’d made the first time he’d awoken and forgotten how to speak—leaves his throat as the memories return to him, seeping back into conscious thought like paint diffusing in water. They’re almost cinematic, the images that play in his head, nearly surreal in their fiery technicolor horror. But Tohru knows they were real. 

They had happened. In their peaceful little town of Sotoba, they had happened.

Tohru’s throat opens on another gasp and he remembers that he must consciously draw air into dead lungs to speak. He takes a breath—the smell of dampness is close and all around him. Beyond that, there is the familiar smell of the woods and in the distance, faintly, the smell of blood. 

Many of his senses had changed when he’d first awoken, some of them more so than others. Even with his increased night vision, his sense of smell is the first thing to come back to him. In the absence of any light, he relies on that.

That is how Tohru knows he is back in a wooden casket, confined in so small a space that it only allows minimal movement. He struggles when he realizes, but there is something holding the casket closed.

“A-ah… help…!” he chokes out before he claps a hand over his mouth, recent memories reminding him to be fearful and cautious. 

He waits to draw his next breath, straining his ears. It’s still strange not to feel the pulse of a beating heart to match the edge of panic.

Focusing on his hearing begins to pull details into closer focus. The summer crickets have grown quieter in the colder months, but there are a few resilient ones that chirp still when the light grows dim. Tohru hears them now, coming from a distance away, from outside.

He must still be in Sotoba. He has to be. The scent of the forest is too distinct and he doesn’t think too much time should have passed. He has no memory of how he came to be here.

An unfamiliar sound grabs his attention. In his struggle, Tohru kicks the the lid of the box he’s in and the sound is deafening in the small space. He is certain it was heard outside as well. 

Sure enough, the sound that had seemed to out of place draws closer now, a constant crunching sound—shoes on leaves and patchy grass, then the sound of boots on rock. Drawing closer and closer. 

Tohru must stay silent. He has no other choice, but even the act of lying still to save his own life is torture.

He doesn’t remember how he came to be here, but he does remember the distant sound of the villagers, the smell of fire and blood, Ritsu-chan weak and quiet beside him. They’d silently agreed to stay there together, waiting for whatever might come. Two people who shouldn’t be alive, damned to this unnatural, unholy fate. 

At least Ritsu-chan had not condemned herself. Tohru, on the other hand—Tohru had blood on his hands. He deserved whatever had been coming. He deserves whatever is coming _now_.

The footsteps, for that was what they were, lead right up to where Tohru is hidden and stop. Then, there is the sound of something being drawn across the top of the lid, something that clanks heavy, metal-on-wood. _Chains, perhaps, or worse_ , Tohru’s panicking imagination supplies. What if… What if he had only been spared because they wanted to experiment on him or worse—!?

The lid flies open so unexpectedly that Tohru reacts without thinking. He springs upright, snarling, fangs already elongated and ready for blood, for violence. His instincts hone him in on the one closest moving threat and Tohru throws his whole weight out of his wooden prison and onto the threat, bowling them over and bearing them down to the hard gravel of the cave floor.

 _They are in a cave_ , Tohru’s brain supplies through the red mist. His claws dig into the stranger’s shirt and pull at the collar, aiming to bare the throat for Tohru to tear into, the carotid artery for Tohru to bleed. _Wait no, no, stop, you can’t_ , Tohru’s brain keens.

His mind catches up with his senses and his sight clears enough to meet resigned violet ones, a ring of red circling the edge of each iris, sclera still white but bleeding into black at the edges. It’s Natsuno—alive, the side of his cheek a healing mess of charred flesh, running down the his right side like he’d been caught in a blast—but alive still and _here_. 

Stunned into distraction, Tohru loses that ounce of control he’d regained. His teeth gnash and he lunges forward to bite, to attack, can’t help it. Beneath him, Natsuno’s hand shoots out, clenched into a fist, and buries itself in Tohru’s solar plexus in a blur of motion.

There is no point in winding someone who does not need air. But a body that once needed breath still remembers to flinch in response. The impact was not a light one, even with Natsuno’s skinny physique in mind, and it does the trick.

Tohru body shifts with the force and Natsuno takes the chance to shove him to the side in a show of power that would belie him if he had still been human. But no, Natsuno was on the same unholy path Tohru was on, led there by Tohru’s hand.

He lands with his back to cragged rock and tunnel face. It hurts. The red mist clears enough against the pain for Tohru to gasp out:

“N-Natsuno!? Why’re you— What are you—“

Natsuno sits up from his place on the floor, gravel and sand in his hair, and stares back at Tohru. There’s a fiery rebellion in them that Tohru had thought fascinating and even kind of endearing back in better days.

“You don’t remember anything that happened then,” Natsuno says in a flat voice. He loosens the hold he has on Tohru’s forearm. It’s only then that Tohru realizes that Natsuno’s grip had been so strong, his fingertips had left half-moon arcs where they’d broken into his skin. Tohru hadn’t even felt it happen.

“Wha— What?”

Natsuno’s eyes narrow and he shoves at Tohru’s chest with that surprising force again, not enough to send him flying this time, but enough to push him back with little resistance. Tohru shifts back a few feet more; somehow, that seems like the safest bet.

He and Natsuno… He and Natsuno had last parted on complicated terms. (And Tohru could hardly forget that this was his own fault.)

Natsuno get to his feet and brushes himself off. But his coat and clothing underneath seems already too dirtied for any amount of brushing to make a difference. There were rips and tatters that, in conjunction with the healing wounds and the smell of gunpowder clinging to him, that gave Tohru an idea as to what Natsuno might have run into in town. It’s a numbing sort of knowledge. 

“Did you save me?” Tohru asks in almost a whisper, having settled on one question first. “There was a m-mob and we heard yelling from—“ 

“Sotoba villagers got rid of every last one of us they could get their hands on,” Natsuno injects. He leaves it at that. 

Tohru gapes at him, despite knowing that this had been what Natsuno had wished for from the start. Something else occurs to him then.

“Natsuno!” he says now, frantic, “What happened to Ritsu-chan!? She was there with me, wasn’t she? How come… how come…”

Natsuno stills for a fraction of a moment. If Tohru had a heart that still lived and beat, he would have felt it sink into the pit of his stomach

“Come on,” Natsuno says after a graveyard-quiet second. The words come quieter this time. He turns his back on Tohru and doesn’t look at him. “We have to make the hours before dawn count.” 

He heads back out towards the entrance of the cave. The chill that creeps into Tohru’s spine is the slow-mounting realization that there’s something utterly unrecognizable about that retreating back. Whatever had happened after they’d last spoken had changed Natsuno 

“...Natsuno?” Tohru calls, as loudly as he dares. He scrambles to his feet, but doesn’t move to follow. He knows he doesn’t want to be left alone here, but his only other option is to put his trust in Natsuno, Tohru’s friend, his victim, and now his terrifying savior. It should be an easy choice. Tohru has always been good at making the easy choices. 

Ritsu-chan hadn’t made the easy choice.

“Natsuno!” Tohru yells this time, an edge of his frustration, his fear, tinging the name this time. He winces at the sound, but wills himself to stand up straight and keep his eyes open. “What happened to Ritsu-chan!?”

Natsuno turns black-sclera eyes on him then, his dark frame backlit by the moonlight outside the cave entrance. The expression on his face could almost have been familiar if there weren’t this extra twist to it, a tinge of something sour and rotten that Tohru could not yet put a name to.

“She’s gone,” Natsuno tells him, “I only saved you.”

The words die in Tohru’s mouth. First is the shock, which arrives like a sledgehammer, but second should have come the anger, then the demand for more answers. But there's something bitter in Natsuno's voice that shrivels everything else up. Something bitter and something that Tohru's empathetic instinct realizes, with a start like a drop of a penny, is _self-loathing_.

"We have to get as far away from the village as possible," Natsuno says, his voice dead again. "There's a car we can take. I have another wooden box from my dad's workshop that you can sleep in when it gets light."

Tohru hears all of this as if through several layers of water, words wheeling and wheeling. 

"...Tohru, come on!" There's irritation now, impatience. That's not important. What's important is

"Why did you save me, Natsuno?" Tohru says, the question coming off his tongue slow and faint and weighed-down.

"I don't know!" Natsuno yells, turning to face him again. His shoulders are drawn up and there's finally some expression on his face that feels a little more like the old Natsuno. Instinctively, Tohru knows this to be a lie, one of those irritated phrases Natsuno gives when he doesn't want to explain his thoughts and feelings. Tohru had gotten good at reading these underlying things over their time together. But that had been the old Natsuno. 

"Tohru, we have to go!" Natsuno hisses, coming back to him, stalking toward him with a furious energy. The closer he gets, the more Tohru wants to shrink back. "I'll explain whatever you want later!"

Natsuno reaches him and makes a grab for Tohru's arm. When Tohru flinches back, half-ready to defend himself again, Natsuno grabs his hand instead. It's a surprise, which is what gives Natsuno time to take hold of Tohru's one hand in both of his and squeeze.

" _Please_ ," he says, fervent and so close to begging, Tohru almost jerks back again in alarm. "I saved you because I saw what they were doing in the village and when I thought about how it would be you when they found you— We have to _go_."

In the murky muddle of everything, this comes through clear. Relief that something familiar might still exist in the chaos that Tohru's life has turned into. It's enough for the time being.

"... Alright," Tohru says, and follows Natsuno this time when he tugs him to leave.

There will be time enough to get all the answers he wants.


End file.
